The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

Author:Ray Bradbury [Bradbury, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1951-05-07T05:00:00+00:00

The lunch bell rang at 1305 hours. The men ran by on soft rubber sneakers and sat at the cushioned tables.

Clemens wasn’t hungry.

“See, what did I tell you!” said Hitchcock. “You and your damned porcupines! Leave them alone, like I told you. Look at me, shoveling away food.” He said this with a mechanical, slow, and unhumorous voice. “Watch me.” He put a big piece of pie in his mouth and felt it with his tongue. He looked at the pie on his plate as if to see the texture. He moved it with his fork. He felt the fork handle. He mashed the lemon filling and watched it jet up between the tines. Then he touched a bottle of milk all over and poured out half a quart into a glass, listening to it. He looked at the milk as if to make it whiter. He drank the milk so swiftly that he couldn’t have tasted it. He had eaten his entire lunch in a few minutes, cramming it in feverishly, and now he looked around for more, but it was gone. He gazed out the window of the rocket, blankly. “Those aren’t real, either,” he said.

“What?” asked Clemens.

“The stars. Who’s ever touched one? I can see them, sure, but what’s the use of seeing a thing that’s a million or a billion miles away? Anything that far off isn’t worth bothering with.”

“Why did you come on this trip?” asked Clemens suddenly.

Hitchcock peered into his amazingly empty milk glass and clenched it tight, then relaxed his hand and clenched it again. “I don’t know.” He ran his tongue on the glass rim. “I just had to, is all. How do you know why you do anything in this life?”

“You liked the idea of space travel? Going places?”

“I don’t know. Yes. No. It wasn’t going places. It was being between.” Hitchcock for the first time tried to focus his eyes upon something, but it was so nebulous and far off that his eyes couldn’t make the adjustment, though he worked his face and hands. “Mostly it was space. So much space. I liked the idea of nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, and a lot of nothing in between, and me in the middle of the nothing.”

“I never heard it put that way before.”

“I just put it that way; I hope you listened.”

Hitchcock took out his cigarettes and lit up and began to suck and blow the smoke, again and again.

Clemens said, “What sort of childhood did you have, Hitchcock?”

“I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That’s more of your quills. I don’t want a hide full, thanks. I’ve always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you’ve died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that’s a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don’t know or understand or want to understand.

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